No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe

Re:No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe by philwelch on Saturday October 02, 2010 @10:28PM (#1751918)

One of my (rather cynical) friends predicts that liberal, secular, Western culture is going to die out in the long run. He thinks certain religious traditions that encourage children and families (traditional Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism) will survive, but not us. I argued it was a race--could our culture infect theirs before theirs outpopulated ours? It'll be interesting to see (in the ominous, "may you live in interesting times" sense of the word).

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Re:No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe by po on Saturday October 02, 2010 @10:52PM (#1751957)

This assumes that a person cannot be born in a religious culture and convert to a more secular culture or vice versa.

[edit] Could the people down-voting please explain why this is not a valid point?

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Re:No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe by philwelch on Sunday October 03, 2010 @01:13AM (#1752144)

I argued it was a race--could our culture infect theirs before theirs outpopulated ours?

That sentence kind of implies what you said. I didn't downvote you (I can't because of how HN works) but I'd assume that's the reason why.

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Re:No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe by po on Sunday October 03, 2010 @01:25AM (#1752163)

I see... I didn't interpret "could our culture infect theirs" as converting people over. I don't see it as something infective. There will naturally be a good deal of attrition. Makes sense, thanks.

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Re:No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe by ars on Sunday October 03, 2010 @10:01PM (#1754286)

Because globally it's a very very small number of people who do this, so for this article it barely matters.

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Re:No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe by olalonde on Sunday October 03, 2010 @01:15AM (#1752148)

China is secular and mostly atheist. Yet they have an over population problem.

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&ctype=l&s...

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Re:No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe by philwelch on Sunday October 03, 2010 @01:44AM (#1752193)

Secular, yes. Western and liberal? No.

But you can't just look at population, you have to take the derivative, maybe even the second derivative. What's the population growth rate, and how is that rate changing? That describes future demography. Whether you're currently overpopulated or not is just the status quo. It's the past.

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Re:No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe by Someone on Sunday October 03, 2010 @05:55AM (#1752442)

Because of their one-child policy, China will also have an aging problem in 30 to 40 years time. Theirs may even get more of a problem, as their replacement rate may be (Chinese statistics are inaccurate, so it is hard to tell) lower than that in Europe.

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Re:No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe by philwelch on Sunday October 03, 2010 @02:49PM (#1753308)

I remember hearing that China's one-child policy only applies in the cities, not in the country. If China's rural population urbanizes they won't have a demographic problem--in fact, the one-child policy explicitly makes room for the rural population to urbanize, which is a big component of development and industrialization.

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Re:No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe by iterationx on Sunday October 03, 2010 @04:00PM (#1753468)

I was talking to my friend about the Muslim immigrant birthrate in Europe versus the natives and how it's a threat to Western culture, but he made the counterpoint that he thought Islam would schism like Christianity has, and therefore there's nothing to worry about.

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Re:No Babies? -- Causes for the aging population of Europe by philwelch on Sunday October 03, 2010 @05:02PM (#1753606)

The question is whether Islam will modernize and assimilate to liberal Western culture, not whether it will schism. A schism might even be net harmful--when Christianity schismed, Europe went through over a century of religious warfare.

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